sang. "Well, I know that you will feel bad when you see what he has had. . . He's got those jake limber-leg blues." T he poisoned jake samples eventually led investigators to Harry Gross and Max Reisman, two Boston brothers-in- law who had undertaken various shady ventures together during the nineteen- twenties. They traded a big country house back and forth, and Reisman ran it briefly as a resort called Breezy Meadows. They dabbled in penny-ante food jobbing, han- dling canned goods, jams, and extracts. But they never used the same business name for very long, and constantly re- arranged ownership of their enterprises in a complicated shell game, no doubt to conceal their dealings at the funges of the illegal-liquor business. Gross wangled a valuable Prohibition Bureau permit in 1921 to handle various types of alcohol, but the Bureau revoked it two years later. Reisman was indicted at one point for shipping five gallons of pear extract to an Indian reservation, in violation of a fed- erallaw banning alcohol on reservations. By 1926, the Prohibition Bureau had the brothers-in-law pegged as likely bootleg- gers. A surveillance memo from the jake investigation describes "several well- dressed men of the bootlegger type . . . loafing about" their office, and one can al- most see the fedoras and spats. In 1927, police found a still on the grounds of the country house. Somehow; though, no one was arrested. In 1928, Gross and Reisman rented the third and fourth floors of a building at 65 Fulton Street in Boston, renamed themselves Hub Products, installed Goldie Sprinsky; a sister-in-law; as their secret and threw themselves into :fiù1-time production of Jamaica ginger extract. They shipped the jake around the country in big barrels, which they filled at night and labelled "liquid medicine in bulk." The brothers- in-law apparently cut comers from the start; now and then, customers would complain that the jake they received from Hub didn't conform to U.S. standards, and Gross would type firm, businesslike answers defending his product. Like a lot of good bootleggers, Gross and Reisman were shade-tree chemists, and in the summer of 1929 they decided to supplement the castor oil in their jake with something cheaper and better. They ordered barrels of dibutyl phthalate, a plas- 56 THE NEW YORKER, 5EPTEMBER 15, 2003 IN THE READING ROOM Alone in the library room, even when others Are there in the room, alone, except for themselves: There is the illusion of peace; the air in the room Is stilled; there are reading lights on the tables, Looking as if they're reading, looking as if They're studying the text, and understanding, Shedding light on what the words are saying; But under their steady imbecile gaze the page Is blank, patiendywaiting not to be blank. The page is blank until the mind that reads Crosses the black river, seeking the Qyeen Of the Underworld, Persephone, where she sits By the side of the one who brought her there from Enna, Hades the mute, the deaL king of the dead letter; She is clothed in the beautifùl garment of our thousand Misunderstandings of the sacred text. ticizer like TOC and three solvents: fusel oil, butyl Carbitol, and Cellosolve. All were clear, oily liquids with high boiling points. But the brothers-in-law wisely rejected all three; they're lethal. Instead, they asked one of their chemical suppliers, Martin Swanson, for some ethylene glycol, another odorless, oily chemical that was common in antiffeeze and nontoxic to most people. Alas, the ethylene glycol boiled off too quickly. A few days later, Gross called Swanson and asked him to find something less volatile. Swanson was puzzled; volatil- ity was not an issue when ethylene glycol was used as intended. SwanSOI) sent Gross some diethylene glycol, which is similar but has a higher boiling point. That didn't please Gross, either. "Well, I don't know what on earth you are doing with this stuff and how you are handling it," Swanson told Gross. Apparentl Gross was mim- icking the boiling trial that federal agents would use if they tested his jake, and was finding that diethylene glycol evaporated with the alcohol instead of staying behind with the ginger. That was lucky for jake hounds everywhere: it was as deadly as the other chemicals. Swanson told Gross that the only thing he had that was less volatile was Lindol, the Celluloid Corporation's -David Ferry trade name for tri -ortho-cresyl phosphate. Gross and Reisman twice asked Swan- son if Lindol was toxic, and asked him to write Celluloid to make sure. OnJanu- ary 18, 1930, Swanson received confir- mation from Celluloid that Lindol was harmless, and he told Gross. Hub bought a hundred and thirty-five gallons of it, enough to adulterate six hundred and forty thousand bottles of jake. Gross would load each shipment onto the ele- vator, take it alone to the fourth floor, and send down the empty barrels. Somebody working for Gross and Reisman may have had second thoughts. On March 1st, a man identifYing him- self as an employee of the Dolan Drug Compan which was a shell operated by Gross and Reisman, called the ware- house that was storing the jake and said, "Those sixteen drums of ginger which you have stored in my name are poison. I don't want them." If an employee was having pangs of conscience, Gross and Reisman were not. On March 15th and 19th-more than a week after the first stories about the jake epidemic hit the papers and two weeks after the call from the Dolan Drug Company-Gross and Reisman shipped two last barrels of jake.